Suita Research Center

Regarding occupational safety and health, we had zero injuries with loss of workdays and zero injuries without loss of workdays. We believe that these results are attributable to our constant efforts focused on risk reduction and risk prediction. We will remain vigilant in pursuing safety activities.
For process safety and disaster prevention, training in risk management to prevent the occurrence of accidents was given by an external organization, and lecture meetings on disaster management were held with internal personnel as lecturers. To increase our disaster prevention capabilities, various emergency drills were also conducted, including those for initial response to fire, and for disaster prevention organizations for self-protection.
With regard to environmental protection, we attained the targets set for FY2022 by continuing to achieve 100% recycling of waste and enhancing energy conservation through efficient operation of air conditioning equipment and the updating of power machinery.
Aiming at ensuring sustainable and safe research activities, we will continue to promote RC activities.

To enhance our ability to respond to earthquake disasters, we held a lecture meeting as part of employee education, with a former firefighter as the guest speaker. Participants learned about preparedness for disaster and preparatory measures from a real experience-based discourse given by the speaker who, as a firefighter, immediately went to affected areas and engaged in rescue operation and fire extinguishment at the time of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.
He talked about many unanticipated events that happened in the wake of the disaster, including delay in response due to confusion in the chain of command, delayed arrival of fire engines due to heavily damaged roads and many abandoned vehicles, manual operation to rescue persons buried under the wreckage of collapsed houses in some areas that heavy machinery could not access, and failure to stop fires effectively due to lack of fire-fighting water resulting from damage to water supply systems.
Through this lecture meeting, we recognized afresh that it would be necessary to provide training designed for disaster management teams to enhance their ability to respond to emergency situations, on the assumption that emergency materials and equipment would suffer damage.

In FY2022, Suita Research Center adopted a “reagent management system,” which enables the use of reagents by each department of the Center to be managed by issuing a bar code for every container and reading the barcode.
The introduction of this system, which automatically records the use of chemical substances, significantly reduces the workload conventionally needed for the preparation of documents, and eliminates the step of checking to prevent error in posting. Regarding general-purpose reagents, this system allows employees to check other departments’ holding status of a specific reagent and to share the reagent, eventually leading to reducing the redundancy of reagents.
We have just introduced the system, but we will make improvements as necessary to further increase its convenience.

SGP plant in Suita Research Center started operation as a GMP controlled plant in 2019.  In SGP plant, we manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) of middle molecule drugs for commercial and investigational use.  Middle molecule drug is a new modality expected to be applicable for various diseases, due to its high specificity to the target molecule.  It is considered to have significant potential in various area.
As a manufacturer of API for this promising modality, we pursue reliable high quality of our products as well as operational safety in the manufacturing plant, so that reliable pharmaceutics can be provided which can be used with peace of mind. We will continuously work for further improvement and stabilization of the quality of our products under compliance of GMP on the basis of our underlying Responsible Care (RC) activities.

*2 GMP : Good Manufacturing Practice